Our second to last stop in Laos was another small town called Champasak down in the south. It only took a few hours to get there by minibus. We found some very cheap rooms with hammocks on the balcony by the river. As we were going out for lunch we got a message from Anton who we had met in Myanmar - he was up the road in Pakse and said he was also coming to Champasak. So now there was six people in our little travelling family!

Champasak was very quiet and pretty, there was a sweet little roundabout in the main road and forest clad mountains as the backdrop. For such a small town there were absolutely loads of guesthouses and restaurants that all seemed very empty - some of the tables were covered in cobwebs. We found out later that there is a very important three day buddhist festival in February where everything gets booked up! Good food was hard to come by in Champasak - we had the most grim meal in one place where they had burnt some vegetables and put it in a green soup that tasted of washing up water and then tried to charge us more than the menu stated for it!

One of the main attractions of Champasak is Wat Phu Champasak, some more ruins of the Angkor era - it is now a UNESCO world heritage site which means its slightly more expensive to get in but looked after ever so well and has very posh toilets!! It was about 9kms out of town so we hired bikes again and went on some very bumpy roads through lovely rice paddies to get there. The ruins were a fair walk from the ticket office, we walked by a square lake and them climbed numerous steps to more ruins. The most impressive bit was the view of the valley below! It was so hot walking around that we both felt a bit ill. We cycled back which seemed to take forever - me and Kam didn't rush at all and stopped a few times to take pictures of the beautiful scenery!

On our last night we had a very loud thunderstorm, next stop four thousand islands!!!